Parenting & Family Quote by Elizabeth Gaskell

Parenting, in Gaskell's telling, is less a reign than a long, strategic abdication. The line turns on a coolly realistic premise: "absolute rule" is temporary, whether the parent likes it or not. Childhood grants adults near-monarchical authority, but adolescence and adulthood arrive like a constitutional crisis. The wise parent doesn't cling to power; they manage the transfer.

"Humors the desire for independent action" is the sly, revealing phrase. Humoring isn't the same as endorsing. It suggests a parent who recognizes independence as both inevitable and performative: the child needs to feel self-directed even when the guardrails are still there. Gaskell's intent is pragmatic, not sentimental. She frames independence as a developmental appetite that can be indulged in small, low-stakes ways now, to prevent a more violent rupture later.

The subtext is a bargain: grant agency early, and you buy intimacy later. Gaskell treats "friend and advisor" as the upgraded role a parent earns by relinquishing the old one. It's also a warning against the parent who confuses obedience with loyalty; when the coercive leverage disappears, so might the relationship, leaving only resentment.

Context matters. Writing in Victorian England, Gaskell knew a world organized by hierarchy, duty, and paternal authority. Her domestic realism often scrutinizes how power operates inside the home, especially when social change presses against tradition. This sentence reads like a quiet manifesto for influence over control: the parent who anticipates modernity doesn't lose authority; they convert it into trust.